Speakers

Michael K. Dershem – CEO, MAPay

Michael K. Dershem, aka Dersh, is a seasoned business development entrepreneur who has assisted multiple ventures and attracted millions of dollars of capital. Dersh is currently CEO of MAPay, a leader in blockchain vision & deployment for the healthcare industry; today providing use-cases impacting both the financial and clinical well-being of the sector. He possesses an outstanding track record in strategic business planning and development, capital sourcing, multi-disciplinary problem solving; in addition to a strong technology-transfer background from government and university research to private sector commercialization.

Nick Thomson – CEO, Viva Network

Nick Thomson is a 26 year old Bermudian entrepreneur. After studying Finance at Florida State University, Nick joined KPMG in Bermuda as a financial statement auditor pursuing the CPA accounting designation. In 2016 Nick began his first venture, Scooter Mart, Bermuda's first second hand motorcycle dealership offering creative financing options to consumers. Since then, Nick has co-founded three startups in the Real Estate Finance sector, including: TLM Development Group, Viva Network Holdings Limited, and Viva Labs Ltd.. Nick's innovative ventures have been featured on the Entrepreneur magazine and a host of other global media outlets publishing content on FinTech, Blockchain, and Real Estate financing.

Kahina Van Dyke - SVP of Business & Corporate Development, Ripple

Kahina is SVP of Business and Corporate Development at Ripple. Prior to Ripple, Kahina lead Global Financial Services and built the global payments partnerships teams at Facebook. She has held executive global roles at MasterCard and Citibank mostly on international assignments. In addition, Kahina is a non-executive board director of Progressive Insurance company. She brings a depth of industry knowledge combined with a track record launching innovative solutions with partners. She is passionate about accelerating the next generation of global financial services and payments to serve people, business and communities around the world.

William McDonough - Founder & CEO, iCash

Will McDonough is the Founder and CEO of iCash, and the inventor of the Proof of Trust Protocol technology. McDonough is an investor and entrepreneur whose storied career ranges from sports and entertainment management to the world of global finance over the past two decades. In 2014, McDonough led the Initial Public Offering for Atlas Mara (ATMA:LSE) with Co-Founder and former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, for a market cap of $825 million after acquiring eight banks in Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, Atlas Mara has more than 3,500 employees and is operated by former executives of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Barclays, Standard Chartered and Ecobank.

Ted has 22+ years of experience leading business development, sales, and growth within early stage technology companies, the last 14 years in FinTech. Ted joins AlphaPoint from Sybenetix, where he expanded the UK-based behavioral analytics company into the US. Prior to Sybenetix, Ted ran Business and Corporate Development for Numerix, a market-leading derivatives analytics company. Ted helped the company realize 15x revenue growth while driving the Partnerships channel growth to over half of this total. He established and oversaw the firm’s 90 partnerships, which include relationships with some of the world’s leaders include Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Misys, Northern Trust, Microsoft, IBM, Sapient, and Ernst & Young.

Suzanne Ennis - SVP, Global Partnerships, Shyft

Suzanne Ennis is a cryptocurrency & blockchain investor, and advocate, with a unique blend of experience in both legacy finance and cryptocurrencies. On the legacy finance front, Suzanne, as a designated Chartered Investment Manager, worked with some of the largest Asset Managers in the world, mainly in business development both retail and institutional. On the blockchain-based & Cryptocurrency side, she has had an intense focus on business and product development, in the Cryptocurrency Exchange & Securitized Token Space; in the gold & mining sector.

Miles Albert - Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Carbon

Miles Albert is an Entrepreneur, Investor, and Enthusiast in the Crypto & Blockchain industry. Miles is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Carbon, a NYC-based price-stable cryptocurrency project that aims to make the global economy more inclusive and efficient. Prior to Carbon, he was an early team member and Seed Investor in Hedera Hashgraph, a scalable distributed ledger platform. He was also an early Ethereum adopter, evangelizing smart contract protocols since its launch in 2015. Miles studied at the University of Southern California.

Eric Gravengaard - Founder & CEO Athena Bitcoin (USA)

Eric became involved in bitcoin after a successful career as a quantitative trader at some of Chicago’s most prominent proprietary trading firms. He has since founded a successful crypto-focused hedge fund with over a three year track record and a multi-national bitcoin financial institution—Athena Bitcoin. He firmly believes in the power of decentralized crypto-currencies to reshape the world financial system to better serve humanity. He has degrees from MIT and the Booth School of Business.

Loretta is a highly dynamic, skilled banking, financial and consulting professional with over 25 years in financial markets and related sectors. She has a worked for major investment banks at Board, MD or senior management level throughout Asia and India including, RBS (India), Macquarie Group (India), Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and Elara Capital (India), Spanning a long career, Loretta has tremendous exposure to global financial markets, multiple asset classes and emerging market environments.

Lisa Douglas - President of the Bermuda Blockchain and Crypto Association

Lisa Douglas is devoted to empowering people.As the President of Dent-Tech Cosmetic Dental Lab ltd, she aides in restoring Bermuda's smiles, one patient at a time. As a real estate agent she enjoys facilitating empowerment through homeownership guidance. Being a blockchain enthusiast, Lisa is the President of the Bermuda Blockchain and Crypto Association and the admin for the Bermuda Bitcoin/Crypto/Blockchain Chat Facebook group, she is enthusiastic about community initiatives and education for the adoption of blockchain technology.As the admin for the Bermuda Rainbow Adventurers Facebook group, Lisa is passionate about organizing fun activities for the lGBTQ community and their allies.

With 25+ years of experience as a Serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, investment banker and board director/advisor as well as C-level executive in listed Media companies, I have helped companies scale, raised and invested hundreds of millions in growth capital as well as successfully exited via M&A transactions as well as IPOs.

Constance specializes in blockchain technologies. The heart of her work comprises navigating diverse stakeholders through evolving issues of first impression in the complex policy frameworks, legal regimes, and emerging norms for distributed technologies in the digital age. Her work focuses on the exploration, elaboration and deployment of global, multi-stakeholder projects and research, conducted in a deeply multidisciplinary manner, to bring clarity in the field of blockchain technologies, smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations (www.coala.global, www.coalalex.org, and www.blockchainworkshops.org).

Lydia Dickens is the Managing Director of CB Limited, a local Bermuda start-up focused on regulatory consulting.She is also the Chair of the Legal and Regulatory Working Group for the Bermuda Blockchain Task Force and is currently a consultant to the Government of Bermuda.Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Lydia was the head of the Government’s internal business development team and was actively involved in policy development and legislative reform initiatives related to Bermuda’s international business sector.

Lydia is a US attorney with nearly 17 years of professional experience.She is admitted to practice in Washington D.C., and the state of Maryland.

David Shrier is a globally recognized authority on digital identity and financial innovation, and leads the University of Oxford's online programmes Oxford Fintech and Oxford Blockchain Strategy, as well as MIT’s Future Commerce (the first graduate fintech class in North America), all of which he created. He has published multiple books on fintech, blockchain and cybersecurity.

Lawrence Newhook is a veteran investment professional with a 20+ year track record investing globally across all asset classes. He has built successful investment and hedge fund portfolios for the pension, family office, and high net worth investor communities, with a particular focus on identifying and extracting sources of alpha from both public and private markets.Mr. Newhook serves as the President & Chief Investment Officer of Alpha Innovations, where he oversees all facets of the business, including product innovation, alpha identification, and risk management.Lawrence also leads Laureate Digital Securities, a blockchain ecosystem engineered to facilitate the creation, administration and secondary market trading of funds issued as digital securities.

Julien Auchecorne serves as Chief Operating Officer of XBTO International, the offshore arm of the XBTO Group, one of the world’s largest and most diversified participants in the cryptocurrency markets. The firm is involved in systematic trading, market making, OTC trading, asset management, mining, blockchain development, and strategic venture investing. XBTO is primarily located in New York, Paris, and Bermuda.

Nick Cardinez is the CFO of Hannover Re (Bermuda) Ltd, the Centre of Excellence for Property Cat within the Hannover Re Group. He is a 20+ year veteran of the (re)insurance industry with experience in P&C, Life and Annuities, and Structured Finance in the USA and Bermuda, as well as in the Insurance practice with PricewaterhouseCoopers Los Angeles. Nick works with Hannover Re’s innovation team in InsurTech and drives automation initiatives for Finance and Accounting at Hannover Re Bermuda.He is a Blockchain, AI and Cyber insurance enthusiast. One vision is to utilize these and other evolving technologies to optimize a human intelligence controlled, minimum friction end-to-end automation of broker submission, modelling, underwriting, through economic, risk and financial reporting, and movement of liquid assets.

Daniel graduated from Northwestern University in 2017 with degrees in Economics and Russian Language and Literature. He came up with the idea for CoinFlip in 2014, and has previously held positions at Uber, R.J. O’Brien, Citadel, and Morgan Stanley. In his spare time he works on his Russian, practices martial arts, plays tennis, listens to hip hop music, and tries to be funny.

Karamoko Dickens is the Chief Technology Officer of Perseid, a local company focusing on implementing eID for Bermuda. He is also the technology subject matter expert for the Government’s Efficiency Committee. Prior to joining Perseid, Karamoko was the head of technology for the Government’s national postal service. Karamoko is a technologist with 20 years of professional experience including regulated financial institutions and the public sector.

Greg Wojciechowski is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX).He is also, the Chairman of the Financial Intelligence Agency in Bermuda, Chairman of ILS Bermuda Ltd. and sits on the Board of Directors of the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) and the Bermuda Business Development Agency (BDA).

Fennie Wang is a lawyer turned entrepreneur in the blockchain field. She is the COO and Chief of Regulatory for OpenWater Capital, a hedge fund focused on digital asset and cryptocurrency markets. In addition, she works on strategic projects with the Bancor, a decentralized digital asset exchange. She is also a cofounder of ixo, which is a blockchain for tokenizing any project’s social impact outcomes into digital assets that can be funded, traded or exchanged.

Ari Chatterjee - CUO, Envelop Risk Analytics

Ari is the CUO of Envelop Risk Analytics and responsible for underwriting and insurance product development. Envelop Risk is a global specialty cyber insurance firm, that uses Augmented Intelligence to quantify and underwrite cyber risk. Ari is an Actuary-turned-Underwriter who has worked in various roles within the insurance industry and a leading researcher in the field of cyber risk.

Carolyn Driscoll - Head of Business Development, DroppTV

Carolyn Driscoll is the Head of Business Development for New York based startup, DroppTV an a.i./ml video analytic company. As a serial entrepreneur,she has built several business in a multitude of sectors. Growing up internationally led to an early love of travel and a constant curiosity. It was her universal view of the world that led to her interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. She believes that blockchain can be an incredibly powerful tool for improving transparency and decentralizing bureaucracy, and as such can accelerate change on a global level. She also has a strong interest in the idea that blockchains can be designed to accelerate access to data and resources for all.

Chance Barnett - General Partner, Decentra Capital

Chance Barnett is a blockchain and equity crowdfunding pioneer, entrepreneur, and investor. Chance is General Partner at Decentra Capital, a blockchain and cryptocurrency hedge fund, and was previously Founder of Crowdfunder.com, and Cofounder of CoinCircle. Chance was a catalyst in the creation of the equity crowdfunding industry through leadership surrounding JOBS Act legislation in Washington D.C. He’s also a Contributor at Forbes on startups & finance and holds a degree in Economics from the University of California Santa Cruz.

Stan Stalnaker is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Hub Culture, a technology ecosystem at the forefront of innovation. Founded in 2002, Hub Culture delivers on a mission to enhance collective consciousness and is based around relationships, experiences, and Ven, the worlds longest running, most stable and environmentally progressive digital asset. Hub Culture offers members access to a valuable ecosystem of services designed to support the needs of today’s global citizen. These services include HubID, digital identity that enables individual data ownership, privacy management and control - true to core principles of the company. ULTRA is an exchange system for digital assets based on blockchain technologies.

Tripp West is the Founder of Trippmatch.com LLC, which is incorporated in Bermuda. Trippmatch is a matching site in the travel space that is due to launch at the end of the year. His team have been busy building the second version of the platform in Cape Town, South Africa and Buenos Aires, Argentina. They have also implemented a brand awareness campaign, which has grown their social media following to over 65,000 since January 2018.

Liquidity The Summit - Bermuda 18-19 October 2018

Liquidity is the Driving Force in Finance - Join the conversation in Bermuda, part of the Bermuda Innovation Sprint hosted by Hub Culture and a host of Fintech partners.